July 12, 2007

Semper ubi sub ubi

There has been a recent flurry of blog posts and news articles on the web repeating the suggestion made by Dr. Marco Mostert in a paper delivered at the Leeds conference that the recycling of linen underwear to make cheap rag paper spurred on literacy during the middle ages because it was possible to print cheap books. Bill Poser mentions the story over at Language Log, and Carl Pyrdum has a post over at Got Medieval which links to a number of iterations of the story and provides some interesting commentary. What strikes me as odd is that this isn’t a particularly new idea. I seem to recall James Burke mentioning the idea in one of his documentary series. I don’t recall whether or not he specifically links the idea with literacy, though I do believe that he suggests that the cheap paper produced from recycled underwear did lead to an information explosion. Curious that this idea should be getting so much attention now.

July 11, 2007

Scip-gefere: Paddle your own canoe (part III)

Though Gulliver can sail anywhere in the world, sailing is still a risky business and he is frequently stranded. Both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the outer frame narrative of Walton’s arctic exploration in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sound a note of danger in unbridled exploration. This is perhaps somewhat comparable to Dante’s perspective of Ulysses. While mankind is more and more able to govern his own destiny, there are some things he shouldn’t meddle with. If the sea voyage is a metaphor for man’s place in the world and man’s relationship with God, then trying to control your own destiny rather than following God’s guidance is a problem.

With the 19th century we enter the modern era, and the biggest technological advance which changed seagoing was the steam engine. Suddenly ships were no longer dependent on wind at all. Even if there wasn’t any wind, a steamship could still go. The technological progression of the square sail to the triangular sail is completed with the advent of the steam engine. This is dramatically demonstrated in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in which just such an incident happens. When the winds die down, the steam engines are fired up, and at one point Phileas Fogg nearly burns up the ship itself in an attempt to win his race against time. This is the ultimate expression of man’s desire to control his own fate. Fogg overcomes all obstacles thrown in his way in order to win the bet, and that includes the obstacles of the natural world and the elements. This is reflected of the Victorian elevation of man’s ability to control his world. In this world-view man has a special place in the world, he is at its pinnacle. He even sought to have mastery over nature — nature was something to be tamed or controlled. And it is in the late 19th century that science is really beginning to challenge religion, with the realisation that the geological age of the earth is vastly longer than the Bible accounts for, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges the Biblical creation story. The Victorian man did not adapt to his surroundings, he adapted the surroundings to suit himself, and this is subtly commented upon in Verne’s novel with the description of the British Empire which sought to impose its customs and organization (often unsuccessfully) upon the world. Furthermore, there is a shift from the age of exploration to an age of tourism. The world has been largely explored by Europeans, and Fogg is really more of a tourist than an explorer. The world is a much smaller place, and this makes man’s stature seem the larger. Instead of defining himself in relation to the world, man redefines the world in his own image.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness stands out as the most striking example of the travel and exploration metaphor. But now, instead of a journey outwards, it is a journey inwards. Instead of defining his place in the world, man is defining himself. Man’s relationship with his world becomes his relationship with his own inner psyche. Man’s attempt to control nature and the world around him becomes his attempt to control human nature and the world within him. But his sense of control is an illusion since he has no real self-control. Yet again the metaphor is redefined for a new era which is so self-referential and solipsistic.

And so I leave you with this little bit of obscure though apropos verse which explains the post-colonic part of the title:

Leave to Heaven, in humble trust,
All you will to do:
But if you would succeed, you must
Paddle your own canoe.

July 10, 2007

Scip-gefere: Paddle your own canoe (part II)

But back-tracking to the middle ages for a moment, we can see a similar metaphor, only the characterisation is different in the Christian world view. For instance, in the Old English elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” harsh exile is pictured in terms of a lonely journey in a boat, and the homiletic implication of this exile/pilgrimage is that the Christian soul’s ultimate destination is back to God. God is the only course to steer towards. Similarly, in the later middle ages, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the Man of Law’s Tale, Custance, who is set adrift at sea by her antagonists to get rid of her, puts her faith in God: “In hym triste I, and in his mooder deere, / That is to me my seyl and eek my steere”. God is her sail and her rudder, her means of propulsion and steering. Again, this is a metaphor of the relationship between the Christian soul and God, and therefore of man’s place in the world. Though as in the ancient world, man does not control his fate, it is not a capricious god to whom he is subject.

Known as great sailors in the earlier part of the middle ages, the Vikings, who really only had the square sail, cheated a bit by lowering one end of the sail to allow for greater manoeuverability. But for the most part they made do with very simple means and no sophisticated navigational equipment. Here’s a picture of a Norse knarr (click to enlarge):

They were often blown off course, and as described in the Vinland Sagas, it was often due to accident that they made discoveries such as Greenland and Vinland. Interestingly, there’s quite the mix of chance, fate, luck both good and bad, pagan, and Christian in the Vinland Sagas.

As for the advance in sailing technology, in the late middle ages or early renaissance, the triangular lateen sail began to be used in Europe. Here’s a picture of a lateen sail:

The triangular sail, of course, works like a wing — high pressure on one side and low pressure on the other — and it allows a ship to sail almost directly into a headwind. And so by tacking in a zigzag pattern ships can sail go in any direction and are no longer at the mercy of the wind, as long as there is wind, as seen here (click to enlarge):

(You can read a good explanation of all this here.) Ships also started using sternpost rudders rather than steering with an oar hanging off the right side (starboard, literally the steering side, as opposed to the left side called port which was the side towards the dock, also known as larboard or loading side). The stern mounted rudder made it possible to steer larger ships, and larger ships could carry more provisions, including most importantly fresh water. These along with the old square sail (to take efficient advantage of favourable winds), as well as improvements to navigational technology allowed for real exploration to begin at the end of the middle ages and throughout the renaissance, kicking off the European age of discovery. Here’s a picture of the complete package:

Note both the square sails and the triangular lateen sail.

These advances too are reflected in the imaginative literature of the period. This is of course the age of humanism, when the cultural focus shifted from the purely religious to the world of man. People began to define their place in the world in terms other than purely spiritual ones. The eighteenth century, for instance, is full of travel literature, perhaps most famously Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver goes out into the world ostensibly to discover things about other people and places, but in fact learns about his own country in the process. Mankind defines itself through its exploration of the outside world, through its own ability to direct its own course in the world. This is a radical shift from the medieval seagoing metaphor as demonstrated most clearly in Chaucer’s Custance, who is really only defined by her relationship to God. The humanist shift in cultural focus goes hand in hand with the seagoing technological shift.

Though Gulliver can sail anywhere in the world, sailing is still a risky business and he is frequently stranded. Both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the outer frame narrative of Walton’s arctic exploration in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sound a note of danger in unbridled exploration. This is perhaps somewhat comparable to Dante’s perspective of Ulysses. While mankind is more and more able to govern his own destiny, there are some things he shouldn’t meddle with. If the sea voyage is a metaphor for man’s place in the world and man’s relationship with God, then trying to control your own destiny rather than following God’s guidance is a problem.

July 09, 2007

Scip-gefere: Paddle your own canoe (part I)

I’ve recently become interested in the relationship between science and technology on the one hand, and literature and culture on the other, and I’ve been working this into my lectures a bit. Here’s an example of a kind of neat idea I came up with for one of my classes. Since this has turned out to be a very long post, I’ve divided it up into three segments, so check back for the continuation. First a little background:

One of the courses I taught this past year was Narrative. There weren’t many stipulations for this course other than that we were to consider narrative from fairly broad terms. I was quite excited at the prospect of teaching this course, since my own research was moving in this direction, what with my work on discourse analysis and pragmatics, and having just given a paper at the Narrative Matters conference I was full of ideas. I decided to divide the course into two parts. First we would survey the major narrative genres of western literature — myth, folktale, legend, etc.; epic and saga; romance; the novel; the short story — and then we’d spend the rest of our time on thematic units. I wanted to consider narrative broadly speaking as a way human beings tend to organise information and make sense of their world. Starting off with myth was a particularly good way of introducing this idea. We compared parallel stories such as creation myths, destruction myths (like flood myths), and so forth from the Bible, Greek myth, and Norse myth. This also gave us the opportunity to do a bit of comparative mythology and consider the differences in religious beliefs and some of the different world views these reflect, for instance the very personal relationship between humans and God in the Judeo-Christian world and the relationship based on fear in the Greco-Roman world.

I also wanted to spend some time on some of the fundamental narratives of western culture, and the first thematic unit that I settled on was travel and exploration. As I was prepping my lectures on this topic it occurred to me that there was an interesting parallel pattern between the travel and exploration literature and the world views reflected by this imagery on the one hand, and the development of sailing technology on the other. I suggested to the class that the travel and exploration metaphor could be seen as reflective of cultural change from the ancient world to the modern. This narrative metaphor often describes man’s relation to the world in which he lives — the narrative is symbolic of man’s place in the universe. And the use of this narrative metaphor changes over time to reflect different beliefs about man’s place in the world.

In the Odyssey, one of the oldest recorded travel narratives in western literature, we see human beings at the mercy of the elements, and by extension the gods. Odysseus and his crew are constantly driven about against their will by the elements. And as we had already discussed in our mythology section, this reflects a common idea in Greek mythology that humans are at the mercy of capricious gods — a common Greek view of man’s place in the universe. This of course is entirely consistent with ancient sailing technology. The ancients had square sails. Here’s a picture of a square sail:

Ships with square sails are not very manoeuvrable. Essentially you go in the direction that the wind blows you. If the wind was blowing the wrong way, you were out of luck, so you’d have to wait for a favourable wind. Sure, you had oars to row, but that wouldn’t take you very fast or very far. If a storm blew up, you’d use the oars to row quickly to shore, as happens at one point in the Odyssey. Thus sailors were at the mercy of the wind, hence the sense of helplessness in the Odyssey.

As a side note, it’s interesting to compare the attitudes towards sea travel in Homer and in Virgil. While Odysseus is certainly trying to get home, he appreciates his journey and learns many things along the way. Aeneas, on the other hand, is much more focussed on the final destination. While the Greeks were a seafaring culture who lived on a peninsula with many small islands and relied on sea travel for their economy, the Romans were a much more land-based culture who hated and feared the sea, though they were practical enough to become proficient at it when required to do so.

It’s also interesting to see what later writers did with the Homeric story of Odysseus. The same story has three different meanings for Homer, Dante, and Tennyson. Homer’s Odysseus is simply at the mercy of the gods. While he does take some interest in the things he sees along the way, his journey is not his will — in fact he’s against it. His journey and his life is determined by the Fates and the prophecies about what will happen to him. In the Greek mythological world, man can’t control his own fate. In the DivineComedy, in contrast, Dante places Ulysses in hell. For Dante, Ulysses journey was an act of will — Dante wasn’t familiar with Homer first hand. From Dante’s Christian viewpoint willfulness is sinfulness. Man shouldn’t try to control his own fate, as that was up to God. And finally, for Tennyson, in his poem “Ulysses”, the hero’s journey is also an act of will, but it is more positive. Tennyson exalts his purposefulness and striving. Man should try to control his own fate. Thus for Dante sailing out into the ocean is bad and Ulysses is placed in hell for it, but for Tennyson it is good and he is lionised for it.

July 02, 2007

Eftwyrd

It’s been almost a year since I’ve blogged regularly, and I apologise for that — it has been a busy year, what with the birth of my son, teaching new courses at a new university, and moving back to and away from Toronto again. But I’ve been missing the outlet, especially over the summer when I don’t have the captive audience of a class of students, so I’ve decided to give it a go again. One of the reasons I stopped writing was that I got bogged down with writing lots of posts about life updates and other mundane topics. So in this latest attempt at blogging I won’t be doing much of that. Instead I’m going to focus on the original purpose behind this blog, which was to freely write about the random little ideas that occur to me about “language, literature, music, food, culture, history” as I wrote in my first entry. So, gone is the day-to-day stuff (for the most part), the food blogging (except for perhaps exceptional circumstances — not that I have that much time for fancy cooking these days), and all the photos.

Having said that, I’m going to briefly break my own rule and give a brief rundown on my life at present. Over the past year I taught at the University of Toronto at Mississauga in the Department of English and Drama. I taught two first-year courses, Narrative and Forms of Literary Expression, not courses in my field but I had quite a bit of leeway with them and enjoyed the experience. I would be teaching at UTM again next year, but my wife got a job at Thorneloe University, so we’ll be moving to Sudbury and I’ll be teaching there as well.

As I’ve mentioned already, our son was born last fall — he’s eight months old now. While neither my wife or I have been blogging much on our own blogs, we did start a separate blog for our son (send me an e-mail if you wish to read the baby’s blog).

Since term ended I’ve attended the Kalamazoo conference, worked on an article which is now just about ready to send out, and planned for our move to Sudbury. So life is pretty busy, but I’ve got lots to write about. By the way, though I’ve been absent from my own blog over the past year, I have been keeping up with reading other people’s blogs, and now that I’m back at writing my own blog, I’ll get back to posting comments on other blogs as well.

So stay tuned for posts about such ideas as the connection between the development of seafaring technology and humans’ sense of their place in the world, some reflections on Byronic heroes, teaching time travel literature from ancient to modern, some ideas about the future of literary scholarship, and other half-baked ideas. It’s good to be back!

June 30, 2007

Test Pattern

February 25, 2007

Blogiversary III

This is a bit of a tease really. I haven’t managed a blog post in over six months—my apologies for that—and I don’t think I’ll have much time for more posts in the near future, what with work and a four-month-old son. Indeed, what little time I have for blogging now is spent on posting on the blog dedicated to my son (if you’re interested in reading that, drop me a line and I’ll let you know the url and password). I’ve meant to post an entry here announcing my hopefully temporary break from this blog but haven’t got around to it till now, and since today is the third anniversary of this blog…

In the past, I’ve written posts on the spelling of blogiversary (here and here). Here is an update on the number of ghits of the various spellings:

2005

2006

2007

blogiversary

37,000

184,000

387,000

blogaversary

3,850

15,500

58,200

bloggiversary

742

14,600

24,400

blogoversary

663

28,600

76,900

blogversary

531

12,300

14,800

bloggaversary

100

310

1,890

bloggoversary

23

63

173

total

42,909

255,373

563,363

As you can see, the total number of hits has more than doubled since last year. There are no startling changes in the relative frequencies, as the following table makes clear:

2005

2006

2007

blogiversary

86.23%

72.05%

68.69%

blogaversary

8.97%

6.07%

10.33%

bloggiversary

1.73%

5.72%

4.33%

blogoversary

1.55%

11.20%

13.65%

blogversary

1.24%

4.82%

2.63%

bloggaversary

0.23%

0.12%

0.34%

bloggoversary

0.05%

0.02%

0.03%

The spelling blogiversary, though still by far the most common spelling and more than doubling it’s number of occurrences, continues to decrease in its percentage of the overall whole. And again blogoversary continues to increase in frequency. The spelling blogaversary is making something of a comeback (though not reclaiming third place yet). Anyway, it’s interesting to continue to track this over time, though it occurs to me that by writing these blog posts, I’m affecting the very thing I’m tracking. No way around this I suppose…